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Oh yeah.
DId i mention that my piece of shit Corvette has been completely disabled this week with a DEAD BATTERY??!??
AGAIN!!
The day can't come soon enough when I can rid myself of that albatross. I truly, truly hate that car.
Quiet Thursday, punctuated by lunch ast Olive Garden with my son and then the rest of the afternoon spent here in my office trying to get some to-do items done at work.
This being here in my office is allowing me to catch up on podcasts and think a lot about the things that I have to do on my own personal to-do list. I am planning on working from home tomorrow again and maybe taking my sister out to lunch tomorrow on the last day of her vacation.
So this evening my mom stopped by around 1700 and picked me up at home. We went to dinner at Olive Garden in Manhattan Beach and then drove over to Office Depot in Hawthorne to pick up a black toner cartridge for her LexMark x5400 Inkjet printer.
We then drove back to her house and installed the printer ink for her and ran the cleaning and alignment procedures for her printer. That all proceeded without issue and her printer is back in business.
After that it was Jeopardy!, the usual 1 1/2 episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger and then a new episode of Criminal Minds after which my wife picked me up at mom's and then we drove home.. All in all it was a rather enjoyable Wednesday afternoon.
Cool.
So, back when we bought my wife's current Explorer in August of 2007, we got 6 months of free Sirius satellite radio and it recently expired in February.
Mostly due to sloth than anything else, I had not gotten around to re-activating the satellite radio in the truck. Well, this morning, while parked outside my favorite donut shop in Lawndale, I decided to call up Sirius and get it taken care of once and for all.
I called them up and signed up for the 1 year deal for $116.95 (+$2.99 for "CD Quality" radio when listening online). that works out to .32 cents a day, $2.30 a week or $9.95 a month. I find that cost well worth it considering all that you get in terms of entertainment and access to information and up to the minute news, traffic and weather.
And, added to that, I can access my Sirius radio stations from any computer with an Internet connection.
NIce!
Nothing much to report.
Life is as life will be. No car. Mom calls me right before 2000 to tell me that Nones is on tonight. So, I sat in my office and watched Bones and ended up calling it a night just after 2200.
Lots to do, lots of stuff pending and just not a lot of motivation to do it.
*Sigh*
So this morning I get a text from my cousin Alex telling me that his 7 year-old Gateway PC has died and gone on to PC heaven. It turns out he took it to a friend of his for some "tweaking" to enhance the performance.
All of that had the end result of a FRIED Motherboard and CPU. The PC was dead, dead, D-E-A-D. So, we decided to go have breakfast at Piggies and then while we were there, we looked at the specials in the Sunday L.A. Times.
We found a special where for $399.00 ($349.00 after a $50.00 rebate) for a desktop PC with:
He called his mom, got her to agree to lend him the cash and we drove to his house to get the money from her. From there we drove over to Office Depot in Hawthorne and bought the computer. Another drive back to his house and we were sitting in his pad in the back.
I watched him unpack the computer and set it up and all was well. All of his peripherals worked and his Internet Connection was up and running too. The same guy that was bumming out over the death of his Gateway a few hours before was very happy with his new PC.
Nice. Now if he would just blog about it, we would be all set. :=)
A nice relaxing day spent putzing around the house and in my office until it was time to go to Asela's for dinner.
Upon arrival, a few minutes later my buddy's in-laws arrived to show his parents the new 2007 Lincoln MKX Crossover car they had just purchased from Cerritos Lincoln. The car was very nice and is in a color called "Creme Brulee", which, as far as I can tell, is exclusive to Lincoln.
After the hoopola with the car, they left and we eventually sat down for dinner (which was awesome) and had a nice chat with his parents. After dinner we drove up to Palos Verdes and had a very enjoyable Scrabble session that consisted of two gmaes which I lost. That was all mollified by the fact that I felt really, really good for like the first time in a month.
The Kidney Stone / Stint nightmare seems to be finally behind me.
Praise God and his Angels!
SO, this morning, after a little adventure with our dog Mamas who decided to scamper out the door as we were getting ready to leave, we took off for the hospital and found relatively light traffic, arriving at the hospital just a couple of minutes after our slotted 1030 schedule time.
The process of getting registered was pretty painless aside from a little flare up between the wife and son. I had blood drawn, an EKG and an X-Ray (regardless of the one that I took with me from the doctor's visit just 48 hrs. before).
I was eventually called and taken to an area where I was sent to do yet another exam, something called a "KUV", which is a scan of my kidney of some kind. Once that was done the family and I were taken to the 3rd floor where we were given a bed in a curtained off area and I changed into the hospital garb and lied in the bed to wait to be wheeled away.
Amazingly enough, YET ANOTHER technician came by my bed to do yet ANOTHER X-Ray, this time it was for an X-Ray of my chest. It took just a moment and a few moments after that I was wheeled away to have the procedure done.
I was attended to by a very nice Anesthesia doctor who explained everything to me and made me feel much more comfortable than the other doctor who was my anesthesiologist on 3/13 during the procedure to pulverize the Kidney Stone.
Once I was in the operating room, the Anesthesiologist gave me some pure oxygen and then a few moments later he stated to me that he would be giving me some medicine to actually put me to sleep.
Boy, did it ever. When I opened my eyes again, I was being rolled down a hallway and it was all over. I was taken to recovery and I just stayed there for a while and rested and recovered. Eventually a middle eastern nurse came to my bed and started trying to get my urinary catheter removed.
The Catheter Removal Nightmare
What took place over the next 90 to 120 minutes was a painful nightmare almost too terrible to recount. The middle eastern nurse in the recovery room, along with the help of another male nurse, were unable to remove the catheter.
Back in the area where my family was waiting for me, a total of five nurses (FIVE!) spent well over an hour prodding, pulling, yanking, twisting and shoving, trying desperately to get the catheter removed. At one point , a call to my doctor was placed and he basically told them that "it has to come out, so pull it out..."
They asked me to turn over on my right side and when I did that, something loosened because not too long after that the hellish episode ended and the blasted catheter came out.
So much time had gone by that I was 100% recovered from the Anesthesia. I got dressed, gathered up my stuff and had them wheel me out in a wheelchair down to the lobby to wait for my son to bring the car around. As soon as the car got there, I practically lept out of the wheelchair and jumped into the car, feeling absolutely a-w-e-s-o-m-e for the first time in the last month.
The Kidney Stone nightmare starts to recede into a bad memory, thank God.
What a motherfucking waste of time.
So this afternoon the wife and I drove over to the Urologists office for an appointment we had to have the stint removed once and for all.
Not to be.
After yet another X-Ray done on the 2nd floor, we had a brief meeting with the doctor in the office and were told in no uncertain terms that he would be much more comfortable doing this at the hospital, under general anesthesia, on an outpatient basis.
He explained the reasons why he preferred to do it this way and I had to agree. So, we left his office feeling like we had just wasted an afternoon and wondering what the hell was the point of leaving a little string dangling in order to pull from??
Dammit. So now I have to deal with yet another procedure, and general anesthesia, and all of the crap and angst and anxiety that comes with having to go to the hospital to do anything.
Why the hell am I in this Nightmare? Why?
I just completed my registration for Gnomedex 8. It is going to be held in Seattle, WA from Thursday, August 21 through Saturday, August 23.
You can go here for more information: http://www.gnomedex.com
This will be my 3rd Gnomdex. I can't wait. Sweet.
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